Mullane: Coronavirus and the dystopian American mind – Opinion – Bucks County Courier Times

Where does the coronavirus panic lead? To a shuttered cabin aboard a cruise ship off the coast of California. We were warned.

If you want to know where public panics such as coronavirus lead, look at a cruise ship cabin occupied by Harry and Karen Dever of Moorestown, New Jersey.

The Devers and 3,000 passengers and crew are stranded on the Grand Princess, a vacation vessel bound for Mexico but was locked down a week ago and was still idly floating off the coast of California this week. An order restricted everyone to their cabins after it was determined that someone on a prior sailing had cue scary movie music coronavirus!

The ship took a sharp left.

I thought maybe there was a storm, Mrs. Dever told our reporter, but the captain announced there had been coronavirus on the previous cruise, and so they decided not to go to (Mexico) and head back to San Francisco.

Karen Dever, her vacation ruined, said its an overreaction. Things arent much better on land. Daily life is increasingly interrupted by the panic. Duke and UCLA, for example, have closed campuses, fearing the virus.

Its not just college administrators protecting their delicate charges whose minds are affected by the panic. Last Saturday, I met a friend for breakfast, and he rapidly pulled back when I went to shake his hand. Handshakes = sickness and death.

Coronavirus, he said.

At Mass, only fearless souls shook hands at the Sign of Peace. The man behind me recoiled when I offered my handshake. It was as if I was trying to shove a rattlesnake at him.

This week, word came by phone from the Bucks County Technical High School, where my kids go, that one of techs feeder high schools, Neshaminy, would be closed Tuesday to be sanitized.

Coronavirus, said the recorded message to parents.

I walked into a drug store in Levittown and overheard a woman asking the cashier for facemasks a faddish, somewhat ineffective coronavirus prophylactic and she was told the store was out, that theyd be restocked in a week.

All of this happened prior to Bucks and Montgomery counties announcing several presumptive positive cases of coronavirus.

Look, take reasonable precautions. But if you are under 60 and are in good health, the only thing coronavirus is going to kill are the gains you made in the market this year.

Not since the early days after 9/11, when panicky locals stockpiled plastic drop cloths to seal windows and doors anticipating terrorist anthrax attacks (remember that?), has overreaction to an unlikely mortal threat been so overblown.

Every account of this bug, when its based on science and explained by responsible physicians, has said coronavirus is a mild illness, so mild that some people dont even know they have it. Worldwide, about 4,000 deaths are linked to coronavirus. Thats peanuts compared to the regular flu, which has killed nearly 20,000 Americans since October. When flu season ends later this spring, some 30,000 Americans will be dead from the flu, about the population of Lower Makefield or Norristown.

So far, coronavirus has not killed any children in the U.S., but this years ordinary flu, now ravaging the U.S., has killed 136 kids. As far as I know, no local school district has (or ever has) burned a day to close its facilities to sanitize the joint.

Why are so many of us leery about coronavirus, from which so few will perish? Granted, the panic isnt full-blown, with people running in the streets screaming, The end is near! as they would if, say, Bernie Sanders is elected president.

Its a latent panic, an irrational dread stoked by 24/7 scare stories. The effects are seen in every abrupt pullback from a handshake, rejected hug or dodged peck on the cheek.

Decades ago we were warned that the table was set in America for the fetid reasoning that emanates from dystopian imaginations.

In 1987, philosopher Allan Bloom explained in The Closing of the American Mind how higher education, with its idolatry of moral relativism, short-circuits critical thinking skills in young Americans. Among the threats is that shallow minds are easily led by conniving authoritarians passing as credentialed experts.

Since Blooms book, the American mind has been softened by an absence of classic, replaced with a steady diet of dystopian novels and entertainment aimed largely at young adults. This has been larded with saturation news of Ebola, SARS, H1N1, Zika and other hysterias. Mix in End Times harangues from climate change catastrophists and socialist Green New Dealers, fold in dire warnings of the fake existential threat of Donald Trump, and the enfeebled mind turns soft as a snowflake.

Closed minds dwell in a dystopian world as dark and hopeless as The Hunger Games.

If we dont change this, each of us will end up like the Devers of South Jersey, forced into a tiny, shuttered cabin until credentialed authoritarians decide we can come out.

Columnist JD Mullane can be reached at 215-949-5745 or at jmullane@couriertimes.com.

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Mullane: Coronavirus and the dystopian American mind - Opinion - Bucks County Courier Times